Price: $179.00Made of Philippine mahogany, this 1/100 scale
model measures 6" in length and has a wingspan of 21". Hand
painted and detailed, model comes ready to display on the included
mahogany base.

Webmasters Note:Built by Northrop
Corporation in San Diego, even though this bomber could carry more
payload, fly faster and farther than the B-29 this aircraft was never
used in active service. The reason for this is not exactly clear. It
was said to be unstable and difficult to control especially in high
cross winds. However, the other story was that the federal government
wanted Northrop to merge with another larger company. This would
relinquish control to the larger company and leave Northrop's founder,
Jack Northrop out of the decision picture. When Jack Northrop would not
allow the merger, the federal government "Black Balled" the Northrop
company and ordered every prototype of the Flying Wing destroyed. If
anyone knows more about this story or can tell me if it is the actual
truth, please let me know at the bottom of this page. C. Jeff Dyrek

To: Jeff
Dyrek

Hello: My name is
Craig Boissy and I am something of an amateur historian who loves WWII
& the cold war. You are probably already very aware of some of or even
all of what I am about to tell you; But just in case no one has already
written you on this............................

The US Government
did indeed twist Jack Northrop's arm to merge with Convair its
competitor in general and specifically its immediate competition for
the long range bomber contract. Of course you can be rest assured
that Convair only wanted to buy out the competition to put them out
of business not because they were going to do anything with wing
technology. There were many improprieties they were well known at the
time and that's why Northrop could not be killed off entirely. A lot
of very embarrassing stuff would have kept whirling around a lot
longer and then it did. Also there would almost certainly have been
more serious investigations into the matter. Some of those
improprieties were things like The chief of the Air Force ( General
McNarney ) sitting in on a meeting between Jack Northrop and the
president of Convair to discuss possible consolidation. This in and of
itself was at the time illegal and unethical. Further General
McNarney was a major stock holder in Convair. Guess what happened at a
meeting he was not even supposed to be at? He did all the talking
and threatened and cursed at Jack Northrop telling him he had " GOD
DAMNED better merge or he would never make another plane " Yep and it
gets better the good General was up for retirement and he was going
to be looking for a top level job in aerospace. Guess who had one
waiting for him? It wasn't Boeing, Martin or Hughes. Finally in the
end though the Hardball politics did not do in the Flying Wing; it
was a series of serious mishaps leading to the death of some of the
best test pilots of the day including Glenn Edwards. There were a
great many in explicable things about those crashes and suspicion
turned to an aviation maintenance mechanic who had been responsible
for for checking the engine cooling systems on all 3 of the wings
which had fatal crashes. Guess what ? they found him dead out in the
middle of the desert. There is more....much more but you get the
picture. The wing was flawed and once it was converted to jet power it
did not have the range of the B-36 it then became competition for the
B-47 which had already been excepted and was faster. Still it had
possibilities. Which is why the Government kept funding it. In the end
the technical and practical considerations which probably would have
favored Convair anyway ( at least in the short term ) had nothing to do
with the death of the flying wing and the blackballing of Northrop
it was back room dirty deals , politics and quite possibly sabotage
that did.Best regards Craig

Limited edition 1/144 scale model of Avro Vulcan #XL426, which
entered service in the early 1970s, saw action in the Falklands, and was
withdrawn from service in 1984. Today, this aircraft can be seen at
South end Airport where it is owned by the Vulcan Memorial Supporters
Club who support its continued preservation. Includes stand.

I noticed you have a model of Avro Vulcan XL
462 but the facts on it are completely wrong! Now I know this because I
am one of the engineers that works on Avro Vulcan XL 462 at South end
Airport. First of all it never saw action in the Falklands conflict or
any where for that matter, secondly it retired from service in 1986
after serving the Vulcan Display Flight for two years, thirdly it
entered service in 1962 and lastly we are called the Vulcan Restoration
Trust not 'Vulcan Memorial Supporters Club'

South end Airport is in the small coastal
town of South end near London, UK. If you are based in the US then the
only Vulcan I know of in the states is the one at a aerospace museum in
California.

In attempting to analyze the role of luck in war, a rather narrow
definition of luck is necessary. The conventional dictionary definitions of luck
are “a force that brings good fortune or adversity” and “the events or
circumstances that operate for or against an individual.” Those definitions are
so broad that they would appear to cover many, perhaps most, events in war.
There is in literature an old expression, deus ex machina, a translation into
Latin of the original Greek thēos ek mechanēs. While it literally translates as
“a god from a machine”, its meaning is a person or thing that appears or is
introduced suddenly and unexpectedly and provides a contrived solution to an
apparently insoluble difficulty. In the book a similar but probably unique
concept, felix ex machina, will be used to denote certain extreme instances of
luck which was relatively sudden, completely unexpected with dramatic
consequences, good or bad, in war.

Dear Jeff,
I am writing you a quick note
about the Northrop YB-49 flying wing bomber per your request on the
web site. I worked for the Northrop corporation as a preliminary
design engineer during the development of the current B-2 Spirit in
1982, and had access to the company records and flight data of the
original flying wing bomber, which I absorbed with fascination.

The flying qualities of the
original B-49 were better than all of it's contemporaries, it flew
stable and was very maneuverable compared to it's competitors, it
held both payload, range and point to point speed records at the
time, and it was also recognized at having a very low radar
signature (radar was a relatively new technology at the time, and
considered a major future threat).

The persistent rumors of poor
flying qualities and stability problems are out right lies and
speculations by so-called "experts". They stem from a
tragic accident that had nothing to do with the
flight qualities. The flight crew during had exceeded it's design
load factor during flight test of the flying proto-type . They were
doing high g "pull-ups" from shallow dives and exceeded the flight
envelope as outlined in the flight test plan. No one knows for sure
why, but perhaps control felt good to the flight crew and did not
realize the danger they were in pushing the proto-types limits, or
perhaps the clean design caused them to exceed the design speed
faster than expected. In any case they overloaded the airframe and
sheared off the outer wing panels at high g. The investigation
report stated these outer wing panels were failed upwards. On a
swept wing design this is the equivalent of losing the horizontal
tail on a conventional design. And it tumbled end over end to Murdoc dry lake below with the loss of everyone on board (the same
way a conventional aircraft would without a horizontal tail). The
pilot name was Edwards, and the air force base bears his name.

Despite this loss, the newly
formed air force was so impressed with the design after the then
required fly-off of all the competing designs, they placed
large orders to replace all of their old Army Airfare bombers.
There was a crooked senator who was chairman of the equivalent to
today's Armed forces Appropriations Committee who was offered some
sort of stock option if the contract went to Consolidated Vultee
(later to become Convair). After the contract was granted to
Northrop after the production had began, and after qualifying
of the first production examples had began, this senator had called
Jack Northrop personally and told him that the government did not
want to support a lot of smaller companies in the post war period
and he would have to merge with Consolidated Vultee to keep the
contract. He found out that it was not a merger, but rather a take
over of his company that he had started some years before the war.
He called the senator back and said no thanks, a week later the
contract was illegally canceled and all the production aircraft and
tooling ordered scraped. And one of the worst bombers the US has
ever bought, the Consolidated Vultiee B-36 became our front line
bomber. Several years later this senator was investigated and Jack
Northrop had perjured himself on the stand because he was afraid of
his company being black listed. Despite that the senator went to
jail for corruption.

I have more details, dates,
names, etc. available somewhere in my files at home. If you want to
know more I will be happy to dig them up for you. This was all
detailed at about the time of Jack Northrop's death in 1979 (I
think) in the Los Angeles Times newspaper. I may have even
kept the article somewhere, and I know I have more information in
some of my personal files.

Many people who are familiar
with the advantages of the all wing design for long range heavy
lifters (as in freight or bomber aircraft) think if it was not for
this corruption, many air liners today would have been all wing
designs. While at
Northrop I had run across drawings and a performance report
of using the B-49 design as the basis for a passenger airliner. The
rows of seats ran span wise within the wing, the windows were all in
the wing leading edge, giving all the passengers a pilots eye view
of the flight

Some of the details I have
outlined above may not be quite correct since I wrote this from
memory, but I will be happy to go find what I have on this shameful
event in us the flying wing history. It is good see someone is
still offering a model of the history making, even if ahead of it's
time, YB-49 bomber. The father of our current front line B-2
bomber. I also have a number of personal experiences to relate
about how and why the B-2 bomber came about, if you are interested.